


Angels Alone Enjoy Such Liberty

by lost_spook



Category: Enemy at the Door (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cages, Community: hc_bingo, Depression, Gen, Guernsey, Imprisonment, Suicidal Thoughts, Vignette, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-20
Updated: 2013-09-20
Packaged: 2017-12-27 03:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/973558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cages come in many shapes and forms, and everyone here’s a prisoner of war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angels Alone Enjoy Such Liberty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the “cages” square for Hurt/Comfort Bingo. Title and the poetry ref. come courtesy of the S2 episode "Angels That Soar Above" (Richard Lovelace, "To Althea, From Prison".)
> 
> Spoilers for S1 finale/S2 ep 1.

I.

A cage, if it be large and comfortable enough can cease to be seen as a cage by its occupants; Major Richter knows this. The creature inside may grow sufficiently fond of its prison to refuse to leave even when the door is open. He knows both sides of this: the island is to be a fortress, and a fortress is intended to keep undesirables out and imprison others within. 

He’s felt the presence of the bars of his cage and beaten up against them at times, wanting action, to be with Rommel in Africa, not here, endlessly working his way through thankless tasks of administration. And yet now he also knows the reluctance to leave the relative safety of the island. It doesn’t seem apt to say it has grown comfortable – comfort is not an apposite term for any of them now – but it is more civilised here than it might be elsewhere. At times he has more fellow feeling for his enemy than some of his allies. Yes, a cage is a deceptive thing.

He shrugs. One survives, one survives; that is the point. Inside or outside of a cage, one does what one must and one survives.

 

*

 

II.

Dr. Martel’s cage is literal and not one he is in any doubt about. It’s become the near entirety of his existence, and if they left the door open for him, he’d run, no question – if he still had any strength left when they did, of course. 

Instead, he waits, and he survives. He does what he’s told, stays alive, and counts the days down on the wall. Release, and home, is hard to believe in as a reality here, but those markings on the wall remind him that it is; that his internment here will end. He is, after all, one of the lucky ones. 

He recites poetry in his head, every line that he can remember; doggerel and classics his teachers forced on him. One recurs more often than the rest, with persistent irony:

_Stone walls do not a prison make,  
Nor iron bars a cage;_

He’d beg to differ, he thinks. Iron bars and stone walls make a bloody effective prison; there’s no getting round that. And when he finally remembers the lines that follow, he wonders. You could say this has opened his mind, even if it’s shut his physical self away. He knows the truth of war now; he’s seen what he hasn’t seen before, sheltered in Guernsey. Maybe that’s liberty of a sort, but it’s not the liberty he wants.

 

*

 

III.

As for Clare, her cage exists inside her mind. She’s a prisoner of guilt and fear and misery. It’s a cage that closes around her and shrinks, pressing in and down on her. It locks her far away from the rest of the world; its bars are unbreakable. She knows that, and she won’t try to beat her fists against them any more.

She will, though, seek her own escape, the only way she can. Life holds no freedom for her now, it’s only death that might. She’ll go down to the sea, as someone did before her; go down to the sea at La Corbiere.

 

*

 

IV.

Olive has a roughly-made cage she keeps her heart inside; that’s how she saves it from breaking. It’s built out of small, mundane things that she uses to fence it within and keep it in one piece. She carries on with the daily tasks, she helps keep the surgery running, she tries and she fails not to worry about Clare, or Philip, or Clive; she wonders for the hundredth time how exactly one is supposed to make a decent meal out of potato and parsnip. She unravels clothing to reclaim wool, for Helen, for children who need it, and debates the merits of acorn coffee over blackberry tea.

She tries not to count down the days until Philip returns, or fear too hard that he never will; nor remember that she has no such date in sight for Clive – nothing but the vague promise of the end of the war, which will never come, it seems. And as for Clare, she tries not to ask, or at least not aloud, if she’s failed her daughter, or if her daughter has failed her.

Only when she’s alone each morning, as she crosses another day off her two year-old calendar, she allows herself that moment of freedom to grieve, and to keep faith.

 

*

 

V

If Reinicke has a cage of any sort, it’s one he’s built himself over many years, though as yet it’s fair to say it’s still a work in progress. Each decision made is another bar or bolt slotted into place. And he surveys the ongoing construction with satisfaction; he cleans and polishes the metal frame. He fails to see anything wrong in that.

Only when it’s finished will he one day find he’s made a fatal error: he left no room inside to breathe. He’ll close the door in on himself, or someone will do it for him, and the iron bars will crush him and there'll be nobody left to care.

 

*

 

VI

Everyone here’s a prisoner of war, one way or another, and they each have their separate cages.


End file.
